Throughout the course of the 2010s, upwards of fifty films were nominated by the Oscars for Best Special Effects, including acclaimed films like Inception, Prometheus, Interstellar, The Revenant and Avengers: Endgame. These movies were cinematic masterpieces that managed to capture the technical nuances of CGI and visual effects, while also furthering the emotive core that underpins all well-crafted storylines.
Unfortunately, none of those films contained fish-related natural disasters, possessed animatronic demon babies, or an unwanted James Corden playing an especially fat CGI cat. Thankfully, there were other films that stepped forward to fill the gap. Here are a few films which had some of the absolute worst special effects ever created.
4 The Sharknado Franchise
What do you mean a film about thousands of sharks getting swept up in a tornado and terrorizing California doesn’t have good special effects? Even one that scored a whopping 3.3/10 rating on IMDB? Shocking. While there’s essentially no plot to comprehend beyond the idea that this film may be writer Thunder Levin’s cough-syrup-induced fever dream, the 'story' follows Fin (Ian Ziering), who tries to rescue his estranged wife April (Tara Reid) and daughter Claudia, following a freak cyclone of man-eating sharks that hits Los Angeles.
After the first film, every sequel created seems to go through a “What-If” stage of production-- What if there were portals caused by an ancient Shark God? What if the sharks organized a coup to take down the White House? What if people, in the wake of sharknados, decided to make shark-themed hotels containing live sharks, which were then swept up in another sharknado? Fortunately, the most logical and plausible “What-If” suggestion occurred towards the tail end (pun fully intended) of the production process. What if sharks were in space?
In an homage to the first Sharknado, where the protagonist’s daughter fell into the open mouth of a shark and was chopped out with a chainsaw by her father, the exact same thing happens again in the outer-space-set third Sharknado - except this time, she’s pregnant. Despite the (zero) gravity of the situation, the protagonist slashes around on the inside of the shark as it hurtles through atmospheric re-entry, resulting in a Great White that looks like the underside of a burnt pepperoni pizza. Thankfully, the father, daughter, and baby all survived, but the integrity of the visual effects team definitely didn’t.
Oh, and to reiterate; this film franchise may have made $4.52 billion and may be one of the most successful movie franchise of all time; this is according to numerous sources, but is both utterly ridiculous and is difficult to legitimately corroborate. Either way, it's true that the actor in Sharknado 5 literally made more money than Gal Gadot did for Wonder Woman. Maybe he took their special effects budget.
3 Cats
Did anyone actually ask for a movie rendition of the already-overdone 1981 stage musical Cats? And, if they did, did they consider the implications of cramming a boatload of A-list celebrities into a production that boasted its “digital fur technology”? Because, presumably, no-one could have genuinely thought, “Let’s CGI a bunch of mostly-anatomically-correct human breasts onto some cats, and have them prance around the streets of London in various states of furry undress - that’ll be a smashing box-office success.” (Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t - the film actually lost Universal Pictures at least $114 million).
Either you already know the plot of Cats or you don’t (and if you don’t, leave it that way), but loosely, Francesca Hayward plays an abandoned white cat named Victoria, James Corden plays himself, Rebel Wilson plays Pitch Perfect's Fat Amy in cat form, and Jason Derulo plays someone who nobody’s been paying attention to since 2012. That’s really all that’s vital to know, other than that the cats also have weird human faces, breasts without nipples, and are so weirdly sized in comparison to their settings that they look like some awful four-legged-baby-rat-mice-monkey-men hybrids. Frankly, the visual effects team could have gone for a second-rate Snapchat filter, and that would have garnered better results than whatever nightmare-inducing CGI was contracted for Cats.
2 The Matrix Reloaded (2003)
Watching any of the fight scenes from The Matrix Reloaded is like playing Grand Theft Auto 3 on a crappy old Dell Inspiron 2500 computer, except somehow the motion physics are worse and there aren’t any good pedestrians to punch. While yes, The Matrix was revolutionary, and the original was one of the best philosophical science fiction films ever created, some fight scenes in the franchise were painful for more than just Agent Smith.
Take the scene where Neo is fighting the clones of Agent Smith, for example; none of the punches seem to land, Neo spends half the fight scene amorphously floating in the air like a plastic bag outside a local supermarket, and at one point, he spins around on a pole in some kind of poorly-rendered Christian iconography. Not to mention the fact that the CGI version of Neo looks as though he was taken from someone’s very faint recollection of Keanu Reeves and then carved into the side of a low-resolution potato.
You might say, this film was released in 2003 and deserves some credit for its ingenuity and (for its era) technical ability, and this would be correct. The Wachowski sisters were usually pretty ahead of their time; but alas, this scene, alongside one or two other elements of The Matrix franchise, haven’t aged well. Maybe 2022 is the year that we can agree to leave the dancing-choreography fight scenes to John Wick.
1 Twilight: Breaking Dawn - Part 2
Picture this: You’re Bella Swan in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part Two. You’ve just accidentally gotten pregnant with a vampire’s baby, you’ve had to spend the pregnancy drinking blood in order to keep it healthy, and, during your labor, you need to undergo an emergency Cesarean because your baby is suffocating.
Then, you snap your spine, die on the operating table, get infected with a vampire bite, and your very dodgy werewolf ex-boyfriend realizes he’s now in love with your newborn. But the worst part? When you finally awake from your trials and excruciatingly painful tribulations, you find that your bouncing baby girl looks like the lovechild of Steve Buscemi and Chucky’s weirder looking cousin. It’s a hard life, being a mother.
For a franchise that made billions of dollars, one would've hoped that the tiniest amount of money could be splurged on some semi-realistic special effects; but no, in between using a terrifying animatronic baby and an excess of CGI for the character of Renesmee, the result on-screen has gone down as one of the worst computer animations in film history. However, despite the mediocrity of this film, it did make way for one of the most unintentionally funny lines in the whole franchise: “You nicknamed my daughter after the Loch Ness Monster!?” The special effects in this film, however, are even poorer than the grainy photography 'capturing' that mythical beast.